When US President Barack Obama and Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu met the other day in Washington they tried to get along fairly well. The fundamental conflict between the US superpower and its political client state was watered down and rhetorically whitewashed. Obama has put up a brave front because he thinks of the day after leaving the White House and the election chances of Hillary Clinton. And Netanyahu was in great shape because he got all his wish fulfilled. A 50 % increase in subsidies, plus the most sophisticated warplanes in order to test them on the Palestinians and the neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Syria or Iran.
For a foreign observer of US foreign policy, it’s elusive that a sassy leader of a teensy-weensy country who behaves like a political madman can push a US President around and gets amply rewarded for his sass. Just before Netanyahu set off for the US, his media adviser Ran Baratz called the President a “modern-day anti-Semite” and about Secretary of State John Kerry he wrote that he has the “intellectual acuity of a 12-year-old”. The political misery of the progressive institutions was demonstrated by the Centre for American Progress. The president Neera Tanden in her “conversation” with Netanyahu acted as a mere stooge. The audience was all convinced Zionists. Controversial opinions: None.